


Welcome Back to the Neighborhood

by Squeeze_the_Fish



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Drabble, F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Friendship/Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-21
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-02 16:51:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5256086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Squeeze_the_Fish/pseuds/Squeeze_the_Fish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After some months away, the Sole Survivor shows up at Nick's door. (Spoiler free, for now)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He's going over some files from his latest case when he hears it- an obnoxiously loud knock at his door. He's tempted to ignore it. It's late, which means it's probably just a drunk trying to find his way home, or it's an addict who's mistaking his door for the dealer down the street. It could be a customer, but somehow he doubts it- it's half after one in the morning. He starts going over his notes again, but flips the safety off his pistol just in case whoever’s at the door gets any bright ideas.

Everything’s quiet for about another minute until a somehow even _more_ obnoxious knock has him sighing and dropping his pen on his desk.

_Well, this is a problem that's not going to go away on its own. Should probably can that, ‘always open’ sign_ , he thinks.

He won’t though. He knows this. It’s not in him to turn people away. Even still, he’s not yet convinced that’s what this is, so he doesn’t get up right away. He can hear whoever it is stumbling around out there and he’s almost convinced himself it’s just a drunk when he hears it; a muffled, “ _Ow! Shit_!” that has him flipping the safety _back_ on his pistol and heading to answer the door.

It's been a while, but he'd recognize that voice anywhere. He's barely unlatched the deadbolt before the door's swinging open and he has to hop out of the way before he's barreled over by one ex Vault-dweller and one of the very few people in this post-apocalyptic hellhole he’d call friend.

“Parker,” he says by way of greeting taking her coat automatically as she shrugs out of it. It takes a second for him to make the connection between the bare shoulder he’d not been expecting to caress and the fact that she’s wearing a dress.

_Odd._ But he recovers quickly enough to catch her when she twirls and wraps her arms around his neck, thanking his superior balance protocols that they didn’t just wind up on the floor.

“Nicky!” she sighs, leaning heavily into him. “I missed you.”

His sensors detect alcohol but at this point it hardly matters. He’s just happy to see her. It’s been a few months since they last worked together and he’s more than a little relieved she’s still in one piece. Be a shame for someone like her to get snuffed out too soon. One of the few people still willing to do _good_ around here.

“That right?” he hums and tightens his grip just a second before releasing her.

“Of course,” and her laugh is breezy even as she hops awkwardly on one foot while struggling to get her heel off the other. “It’s been too long.”

He steps forward and offers an arm for support which she immediately takes.

“So it has,” he agrees. “Was wondering when you’d come knockin’ at my door again. Though I have to say, if we're going to continue saving the Commonwealth from itself, you might want a change of clothes,” he says nodding toward the little blue number she’s wearing, “What’s with the getup?”

She scoffs, having finally removed both heels and tossing them into the chair usually reserved for his clients.

“It’s not a _getup,_ Nicky, it’s a _cocktail dress_ and I’m wearing it because that's what you wear when you go out on a date.”

“Ah.” Of course. He pulls a cigarette out of his pocket and lights it up taking a long, slow drag. Makes sense now. Explains the hair and makeup too. “Have a good time?”

Her head tilts to the side and she gets a sort of dreamy look in her eyes that he wouldn’t normally associate with her, an easy, if subdued smile pulling at her lips. “Yeah,” she says finally, “I think I did.”

He’s happy for her. Wasn’t everyday you came across a gal like her- one willing to put their life on the line in hopes of making things better for others. Hard to imagine anyone being worthy of her. Not in the Commonwealth anyway.

With a subtle shake of her head, she seems to snap out of whatever memory was holding her, though the smile’s still there. A small part of him wonders who put it there, but he quickly brushes the thought aside. Her private life was just that- _private._

“Got any coffee, Nick?”

He doesn’t. He wouldn’t ever have it in his office if not for her. Ellie doesn’t care for the stuff and he, well, he has no use for it either. Once he found out how much she liked it, he usually made a point to have a few instant packets lying around in case she showed up. But then there was that incident with the radroaches and...well, it’s not worth explaining.

“I don't, but I can go pick some up if you've gotta’ craving.”

She pauses and gets a gleam in her eye as if he’d just offered her something precious and dear. Maybe to her, it was. He couldn’t say he understood it, but if coffee was the worst of her vices, he wasn’t going to take issue. He knows it could be worse, much worse. It’s not a thought he likes to dwell on.

“No, it's alright,” she says softly, “I should probably just get some get some sleep, actually. It's been a long night. Mind if I crash here?”

“‘Course not,” he says surprised she even bothered to ask. He jerks his head toward the ceiling. “Bed’s upstairs waitin’ for ya’.”

She nods and gathers her recently tossed heels. She stops before leaving, puts a gentle hand on his shoulder and plants a kiss so soft on his cheek, his sensors almost don’t pick it up.

“Night, Nicky,” she whispers and walks toward the stairs.

 

Some hours later, she wakes to one hell of a hangover and finds herself wrapped protectively in a familiar, but tattered trench coat smelling strongly of stale cigarettes and oil. On the bedside table, next to a bottle of water and a couple of aspirin is a note.

_For the pain._  
_-Nick_


	2. Just Like Old Times

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The duo heads out into the Wasteland and it's just like old times. Sort of.

It feels like they’re picking up right where they left off. As ever, the Commonwealth has no shortage of problems to be solved and he and Parker seem to be one of the few willing to do anything about it. He doesn’t ask about her time away and she doesn’t seem particularly eager to talk about it either. It’s just as well, if the rumors about her and the Brotherhood are to believed, he can’t blame her for not discussing it with him.

 

And sure, he’s disappointed. Those synth-hating sons of bitches could rot in hell for all he cared. The thought of her being associated with those twisted assholes makes him want to shake her and shake her until she tells him it’s not true.

 

At least, he _hopes_ that’s what she’d say.

 

“Hey, Nick,” she says waving a hand in front of his face. “Everything okay?”

 

He blinks and sets off an exaggerated pulse from his internal homing device. “What? Yeah. Just running some diagnostics.”

 

He doesn’t even know why he lies about it and he’s a little disturbed by how easily it comes. Even worse is how easily she seems to accept it.

 

“Gettin’ old there, Valentine?” she says with a grin.

 

He chuckles. “Not so old I can’t keep up with you.”

 

Her eyes light up and she makes a show of ejecting the empty magazine from her pistol and slamming a new one in its place. “We’ll just see about that, won’t we?” She peeks her head up from a broken window in the back of the old bus they’ve been encamped in and squints.

 

“I count twelve, maybe fifteen tops,” she whispers after ducking back down. “Bet I drop more than you do.”

 

And that’s all the warning he gets before she’s leaping out the window, guns blazing like a madwoman completely wasting their element of surprise.

 

“I thought you were smarter than this!” he hollers toward her receding figure before lighting a cigarette and joining the foray himself.

  
  


 

It was raiders, because _of course_ _it was_ and in the end she’d grossly underestimated their numbers.

 

“Reckless,” he grumbles while tightening a makeshift bandage around her waist with a little more force than was necessary. He doesn’t like how much blood is already seeping through the dirty cloth, but there’s little to be done about it now. She’s fresh out of stimpaks and he isn’t carrying any.

 

“Yes,” she agrees, still a little breathless from the fighting. “But I still won.”

 

“By _one_ shot,” he counters.

 

She grins through bloody teeth, plucking the cigarette from his mouth and taking a drag. “Winning,” she says sighing on the exhale.

 

He shakes his head and stands up, holding a hand out for her to take. She does, and that she struggles to stand despite his aid only reinforces everything he’s already feeling. As soon as she’s firmly on two feet, he takes his cigarette back.

 

“You tripped over a pipe bomb and just happened to kill two of them instead of yourself. I say you lose points for dumb luck.”

 

She crosses her arms and winces a little when she accidentally bumps the wound there.

 

“How do you know I didn’t do it on purpose for that very reason?”

 

“Because that would just be stupid,” he says bluntly and with more heat than he meant to. Maybe it's the stress, or maybe it's after so much time apart, he's forgotten how lively things tend to be when working with her.

 

Or maybe he really _is_ getting old. A troubling thought.

 

“You ready to leave?” he asks, pointedly ignoring the concerned look on her face. “I doubt there’s anything here worth salvaging.”

  
  
  


As most things do, it all eventually comes to a head the next time they go out. She goes barreling into enemy territory like she does; like a person hell bent on going out in a blaze of glory. He’s there beside her, tossing grenades and covering fire as best he can manage without hitting her in the process. It’s absolute chaos, like it always is, but he’s so concerned with watching her back instead of his own that he nearly takes a board to the head.

 

“Watch your six, Valentine!” she yells, spinning on her heel and blasting the supermutant with a shot from her pistol.

 

It’s enough to stagger the giant and Nick retaliates by stabbing it between the eyes with the bayonet of his rifle. Things just go south from there.

 

They’re ass deep in mutants and their hellhounds when he hears it- the telltale mechanical pulse of a countdown. Panic almost immediately sets in and he’s using every scan in his arsenal to find the suicider, but there’s too much smoke and debris in the air for a visual and the rads and doing something to his radar systems. He can’t get a lock, he only knows it’s getting louder by the second.

 

“Parker-”

 

“I hear it! Where is he?” she shouts with a hard edge to her voice, whirling around looking for the monster from a few paces to his right.

 

He sees it then- like everything’s in slow motion -when the dust parts and a blinking red light comes into view not fifteen feet away. There’s not enough time. There’s no exit strategy that’s going to get them far enough away from the blast to survive this. He looks to Parker, whose eyes are locked on him when he sees it. Something he never thought he’d see in her.

 

...fear.

  


Well, he always wondered what it would take.

 

Later- _much later_ \- he would claim it was what set him into motion. Because if Parker was afraid, that meant she had given up and Parker didn’t give up unless she was sure she was going to die and he wasn’t about to let that happen.

 

Most of his computing processes stopped, all redirecting to the achievement of one goal.

 

Get the bomb away from her.

 

So that was what spurred him forward, with a plan so suicidal, he’s surprised she didn’t think it up herself. Instead of running away, he ran toward the flashing light and in a moment of true-blue heroism, grabbed the mutant with all his strength and together they dove over the side of the guardrail, dropping a good fifteen feet into the toxic waters of the River Charles.

 

Or, at least, that’s how he would tell it.

 

He would leave out the part where by chance the mutant struck a broken pipe on the way down causing them both to go ricocheting in opposite directions. Or the part where he somehow landed behind an old plowhead avoiding most of the resulting damage from the bomb when it detonated.

 

He would never tell a soul that when Parker found him, mostly intact, she immediately burst into tears, alternating between sobbing into his chest, and hitting it with her fist. The words she spoke- of how much she needed him, how her life wasn’t worth his and he’d better never do that again… Well, those weren’t something to be shared with just anyone.

 

They had reputations to maintain, after all.

 

So he wouldn’t. He would lock the memory far away, behind every encryption and firewall he could manage, where no one could ever find it.

  
Except for him, of course.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone for all your support and encouragement for the last chapter. Definitely helps with the motivation for new chapters. :D


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A proposition is made.

It just wouldn’t be a night out with Parker if somebody didn’t end up needing medical attention. Or in his case, several hours worth of diagnostics and repairs. They were only supposed to be going out for noodles. Now, she was nursing a head wound and they were both soaking wet, creating small puddles in the middle of his office.

He holds her chin with his good hand and examines her.

Thankfully, it’s not a deep cut, just bleeding a lot as head wounds tended to do. His makeshift bandage aka the sleeve of his shirt that he hastily ripped off and tied around her head to staunch the bleeding seems to be doing its job well enough.

He relaxes back in his chair, pulling out a soggy pack of cigarettes and looking at her meaningfully.

“I told you not to do it.”

She shrugs and doesn’t look the least bit sorry. “When has that ever worked?”

Using his feet to scoot his chair over to his desk, he pulls out a drawer, digs through it a little until he finds what he’s looking for- a _dry_ pack of cigarettes- takes one out of the package and lights it. He takes a nice long drag, the fresh smoke joining waifing slowly to the ceiling.

“One of these days, Parker, you’re finally gonna' start listening to me. What a team we’ll make. Three, maybe _four_ times as effective as we are now. We’ll have the Commonwealth cleaned up in no time.”

She leans forward in her chair toward him. “Four times?” she asks plucking his cig out of his mouth and taking a hit. “How do you figure four times?” She puts the stick back in his mouth. “I maybe could have given you two times- and that’s a big ‘maybe’, but not four. That’s just ridiculous. How d’ya figure _four_ anyway?”

He scoffs and makes a show of taking off his soaked hat before answering. “Recovery time,” he says simply. At her skeptical look, he continues. “You ever think about how much more we’d be able to accomplish if we weren’t always so laid up after each mission?”

He’s mostly bringing it up just to get a rise out of her for their current situation. Traveling with her wasn’t all that bad. Wasn’t bad at all, really. A nice change of pace, and despite her antics, it always felt like they left the world in a little better state than they began. Of course, he could do with her showing a little more caution every once in a while, but maybe that was just part of their dynamic. She was the wild card, and he the ace in the hole.

Yeah… he kinda’ liked the sound of that, actually.

“You act like that’s a bad thing,” she says continuing their conversation while unlacing a boot and struggling to pull it off. “I know you’re Mr. Super-Detective-Synth-Man who never needs to eat, sleep, or fuck, but _some_ of us poor sods gotta’ do the do, Nick. We gotta’ _do_ the _do.”_ She wiggles her eyebrows at him suggestively.

He almost chokes on his cigarette.

She laughs at him then and- after finishing taking off her other boot- saunters over to his chair with a sly grin upon her face. She leans down slow and easy, until she’s close enough that their faces nearly touch. He can see the glow from his eyes reflecting in her own and he stills his simulated respirations.

“But you know, Nick,” she glances down at his lips and back up again. “If you’re trying to save some time, you _could_ indulge me every now and again. Keep me sated, warm my bed. And-” She wraps his tie around her hand and pulls him toward her just a little bit more so that when she speaks, he feels the brush of her mouth against his. “If there’s something I could do for you in return, well, let’s just say I’ve got an open mind.”

Well, this is a conversation he never envisioned he’d be having. Not with anyone. So the thought never crossed his mind. He’s not even sure how it’d work. He has memories, sure. From the real Nick. He knows what it feels like to desire a woman. Hell, he’s pretty sure if the guy was still around, he’d desire Parker.

But did _he?_ The here and now, half-broken synth-detective? He wasn’t sure he could answer that. Wasn’t sure he should. He and Parker had a good thing going.

“Don’t you think that could... complicate things? Between us, I mean?”

She pulls back just a smidge, gives him a look like she’s surprised he’s even considering. Maybe she wasn’t expecting him to. Maybe she’s just toying around with him like she tends to do. He suddenly feels ridiculous. Of course she wasn’t serious.

But she tilts her head and gets a gleam in her eye.

“It’s not like I’m asking for any sweeping gestures on your part. Just… ya’ know, an occasional fuck. Between friends. If-if you’re interested, that is.”

If he didn’t know better, he would say she sounded _nervous._ For what, he can’t even begin to imagine. He’s the one with no firsthand experience to draw from here.

It’s a bad idea. There’s some lines that just shouldn’t be crossed and trying to make flesh and blood mix with metal and circuits had to be one of them.

...So why wasn’t he telling her no then?

His shoulders slump. He knows damn well why he isn’t telling her no. Because she was Parker, someone he respected, probably more than anyone else in the world. Sure, she was crass. But she was also _good_ and did good things for people without expecting anything in return.

And… he was curious. Of how it would work. How her skin might feel underneath his hands. Would it be like it was in his memories? Hot, passionate, all-consuming. Or would he feel nothing at all? Touch and feel her in a detached sort of way, like a doctor would a patient, or a mechanic might a machine.

Realistically though, this was probably his one and only chance to find out. He doubted whether any woman would make him this offer ever again. He was lucky it would be with someone he trusted. So…

“Alright. Yeah,” he says with a slight upturn of lips. “We can give it a shot.”

Her eyes grow wider than he’s ever seen them. She’s clearly shocked, but recovers quickly, favoring him with a smile that reaches all the way to her eyes. Genuine. Not something he sees from her very often. She leans back up, holding his tie so that he has no choice but to follow her.

It’s when they’re standing face to face that she runs her teeth over her bottom lip. She meets his eyes and the look she gives him is unmistakably heated.

“Good,” she replies, voice low and husky. “So why don’t you start by helping me take off these wet clothes?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay folks, real life calls. 
> 
> I didn't stop here to be mean, I have a sort of an unofficial poll I'd like to take before working in the smut. So here it s. 
> 
> Do you guys wanna' see Nick with or without a dick?
> 
> Comment below, let me know. 
> 
> As always, thanks for reading and special thanks to those kind enough to give kudos and let me know they're enjoying the story so far.


End file.
